Modernism, Postmodernism, and Digitality
Modern Markers
The first Modern marker was the change from continuous x2 to discrete. This was seen in both physics with the Plank Constant, in art by the creation of a strip of still images that were projected fast enough to seem to have motion, and in industry with the creation of the assembly line. The markers piled up in the last year of the 19th century and in the first decade of the 20th. This means that we can take the Modern view as truly starting in the waning years of the 19th century.
Then the next phase was the change in how the “Great War” was made into an armistice. The Neoclassical was a marker that said that the time to organize affairs was over and a new form of international governance and law came to the forefront. But because it was still revolutionary in its underpinnings it meant that it could not cast as a government a whole which would be recognizable. This means that the closure of World War I was clearly the revolutionary moment for the modern era, and that it was a revolutionary era. This meant that there were a large number of attempts to form a government that could master the total warfare which was the capital threat.
However, these ideas could not apprehend the problems with the economics of neoclassicism. And therefore in the early 1930s, a new set of governmental systems begin to be tried out in major countries. One idea was to use dictatorial methods to unify the population and set them on a goal. This included the Nazi party in Germany, the Bolshevik party in Russia, and the militarism in the Empire of Japan - each with different decisions to guide the nation from above. For example, in Nazi Germany and the USSR, a civilian leadership controlled the military while in Japan the military formed a government out of its key leaders, which meant that it was not controlled by a single man but by a group of individuals acting as a collective. On the other side, the United States of America tried a different road whereby expanded powers for the executive were used to control almost all of the economic forces and therefore created a new state based on things such as administrative law. Inevitably these powers went to war because the challenge was still how to control a total war. This period Entered into the evolutionary phase of modernism with four of its countries changing direction in the early 1930s: 1932 with the change in the cabinet in Japan, the Election for the President in the US, and the means by which the Chancellor became “Die Fuhrer” in 1933. The change in the USSR was more gradual but it was again by the 1930s that Stalin finally controlled all of the levers of power.
Then in the 1960s, a change to postmodern dynamics occurs. However, as with most phenomena, the government is often the last two to understand its role: it takes a great deal of time and effort to implement a government from new principles. However, the Cuban missile crisis makes a good marker of how the games between countries had to be changed. From now on the game theory of opposing sides on a grid with outcomes predetermined becomes the manner in which games will be decided. We can also use the advent of color television as a marker because it fits smoothly in the US to the change from black-and-white to color television.
Interlude - Boxes of Technology
One detail that has been overlooked is that there is a communication issue between two people that are about 1σ a part, or about 15 IQ points with the attendant education. this means that any advancement either in perception, theoretical ability, or practical ability, must go through each of the stages. this means that the most gifted will be able to explain what they are seeing and in some way write it down. the next group of people can explain what the gifted people are doing. And so on down the line.
In practice, this means that the top, with her intelligence or vision or physical ability or any other gift, seems to effortlessly float to see connections that are invisible to almost any other person. For example in the modern to people made advances that were unrecognized by their peers because it required that a simple change that was impossible be met: Plank and Einstein were the first people to publish papers that said, in different ways, that the units of photons had to be discreet rather than continuous. This is how the Planck length and Einstein’s photoelectric effect were published. The same is true in painting where Cézanne realized that blocks of color could stand in for the nuance version of this and rocks. When Cézanne made a show the other painters realized what was missing in their own work and it made their heads hurt and they had to go back and learn all over again the basics of painting to paint the way Cézanne did. The members of this group were Picasso.
This means that the very first layer is a wholly untransformed expression of a new kind of product, whether science, technology, art, or leadership. The reason that leads do not tend to be in this position is that they must use the tools that are available, in quantity, and that means that their tools are of average quality, whatever “average” is in a convolution sense.
The second tier is one doubling down, and can therefore explain and create in the same mode as they had been taught by the visionaries. That is to say, the first box is of untransformed and untrembled, vision. The next year down however has a freedom because they have come to this vision anew. This is why Picasso is more famous than Cézanne: because he was not a particularly good painter even though he saw more clearly than others. The next level contained much more proficient painters who were then imbued with the vision that Cézanne gave them.
So how many boxes does it take? Realize that IQ is only one possibility: IQ is merely one of the tools and there are others as well such as hearing, listening, and constructive modes which only partially align with IQ, and other talents as well. But the graph is a Gaussian graph:
But remember we are not seeking the average in any form, Kurtosis reaches far beyond 3σ: for example, the top level of the Premier League or National Football League or any similar set of highly skilled professional athletes is almost 5σ above the standard. This means that in any sufficiently rarefied air of competition, there must be luck but also the kurtosis. If we take 5σ as the standard we can see that there are as many as five boxes which the information must go through: the originators of the idea can then communicate to other subsidiary originators: an example would be Einstein who was caught in a dilemma in his general theory of General Relativity. He was not explaining to average students but two to of the most gifted individuals, one of whom was Noether. She managed to create a different way of looking at conservation as an equivalent to a differentiable symmetry in the systems presented. This meant that Einstein could not have two counts as equivalent time: each time would be different in a symmetrical way and therefore have a conserved quantity. Noether published this idea in a paper that allowed Einstein to present his theory of General Relativity. this means that at each level there will be a recursive call back to the same level as well as a simplified version that goes down to the next level.
In other words, the first pass is for visionary creators to instruct other people of tremendous ability that correct errors and publish new papers. This means that the first box is also recurrent: the symbols input can be the output to another box.
Each attempt at producing this chain has an obvious problem most things do not want to start a new chain but to affirm the original cultural system. It is only when there is no answer in the old cultural system that it even attempts to start a chain. The other possibility is equally possible in that a chain that has no reason to be is published in the hopes that it might be the answer to a question that has not been proposed. For example, for the last 40 years in particle physics the attempt to establish “String Theory” as a replacement for the standard unified model. There are problems with the standard unified model and string theory has been an attractor because it relies on a basic intuition. Several physicists have made significant progress - but it does not work because it relies on an 11th-dimensional model and there is growing evidence that the 4th dimensions are what the universe prefers. This means that despite the brilliance applied to it it is probably, and getting more trouble all the time, not the correct theory for particle physics in our universe.
But the nature of any chain is the attempt to establish the basics on a more sound footing than is currently available.
There is also the problem that the ground state of a particular cultural system no longer works. For example, in 1959 it was realized by a number of thinkers in a variety of disciplines that the basic unit of economics, the fossil fuel economy, had a major weakness it: it relied on fossil fuel burning which generated carbon dioxide and methane as well as other gases which trapped heat inside the atmosphere. But at the time it was not a problem for anyone who was living and therefore was ignored. Unfortunately, we are now living some 60 years later when human beings who are alive now will be presented with a quandary. This means that the system as it exists will have to be organized whether the economics deems it appropriate or not.
But when the cultural system is challenged a new cultural system emerges first acting as a foot soldier for the dominant cultural system, but then as a dominant force in its own right. This is why Digitality is about to explode: there are a variety of methods that come together and make it impossible to do things in the Postmodern way. In some areas, it has already happened and eventually, the leaders will be replaced by others who understand that a new system of economics must conform to a different cultural system.